"Intelligence to a modern liberal isn't depth, it's appearance. It isn't even an intellectual quality, but a spiritual quality. Compassionate people who care about others are always "smarter", no matter how stupid they might be, because they care about the world around them.

And that is the supreme duty of the modern liberal intellectual, not to be smart, but to make others feel smart.

The thought never rises within this bubble of manufactured intelligence that all of them might really be idiots who have convinced themselves that they are geniuses because they read the right books (or pretend to read them), watch the right movies and shows (or pretend to) and have the right values (or pretend to)."

The problem isn't that our progressive friend with a PhD and a teaching position somewhere thinks that it's Tow the Line. We all go through life discovering on occasion that we got something very simple wrong. It's that he believes in his own intelligence because he has the right values. He's gay and liberal, therefore he's smart. I'm conservative, therefore I must be stupid.

Any other outcome is impossible. And so he doesn't know what he doesn't know which makes actual progress impossible. In a worldview where intelligence is just liberal values misspelled, Obama's 57 states is correct while Romney's binders of women is a huge gaffe.

It's not a debate over facts. It's a cultural difference. We're losing the ability to discuss anything because the dominant cultural paradigm is in the hands of people who care about values, not facts, and who are convinced that if they have the right values, the facts will follow.

It didn't work in the USSR. It's not working in Venezuela. And it isn't working in America.

GETTING TO THE POINT

The Freedom Center has assembled some 20 of my best articles from last year into an ebook titled "Getting the Point."

September 11 was a calling card that served its purpose for Al Qaeda moving it along to its next stage from a series of isolated terror groups to a global army with the manpower to launch full scale guerrilla wars seizing cities and entire regions. The core Al Qaeda doesn’t need another September 11. It will leave that to its affiliates, some of which are already playing with WMDs.

The Al Qaeda that we think we know, the terrorist group with cells lurking and plotting attacks, was only an intermittent stage in its growth strategy. The same is true of most terrorist groups. There was a time when the Communists were just another bunch of quarreling groups. Then they became an army and a country and a whole global union of countries. That is where Al Qaeda wanted to go all along.

Al Qaeda wants to destroy America, but it doesn’t need it to do it in the linear fashion that many imagined after September 11, by scaling up to more and more devastating attacks.

The “Palestinian” case that Judis retroactively constructs is a modern invention and he admits as much. Liberals of the day, like Bartley Crum of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, heard from Dr. Hitti of the Institute for Arab-American Affairs that there was no such entity as Palestine.

Ahmad Shukeiri, before he became the first Chairman of the PLO, told the UN Security Council that, “Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria.” Abu Nidal, the ultimate Palestinian terrorist, proclaimed, “Palestine belongs to Syria.” Azmi Bishara, the Arab Israeli MK who fled the country after collaborating with Hezbollah, said in a television interview, “I think the Palestinian nation is a colonial invention.”

Judis dismisses Jewish nationalism as a 19th century invention, when it’s Palestinian nationalism that is a late 20th century invention.

This was just what Lady Young was looking for. She had already been giving lectures and evidence to a House of Lords committee on the EU’s earlier Water Framework directive, proclaiming that one of her agency’s top priorities should be to create more ‘habitats’ for wildlife by allowing wetlands to revert to nature. As she explained in an interview in 2008, creating new nature reserves can be very expensive. By far the cheapest way was simply to allow nature to take its course, by halting the drainage of wetlands such as the Somerset Levels. The recipe she proudly gave in her lectures, repeated to that Lords committee, was: for ‘instant wildlife, just add water’.

The civil war encompasses debates over testing and charter schools. On one side are technocratic progressives backed by Silicon Valley; a small army of successful men and women turned amateur experimenters trying to tinker with schools in their free time through wealthy foundations determined to centralize and nationalize the educational system. On the other side is the traditional inertia of teachers unions still fighting for a school system that gives teachers everything and asks for nothing in return.

On one side is Bill Gates. On the other side is a fifth grade teacher with seniority looking forward to retirement.

But when it comes to Common Core, the unions aren't wrong. Every educational reform is a band aid meant to fix the last reform. Now Common Core already needs fixing.

All that would make Dahlan a bit of a Shakespearean villain, killing everyone in sight to seize power, playing the United States against Russia and Israel.

Bill Clinton liked Dahlan. He was, until Abbas, the only Palestinian Arab figure to get a private meeting with President Clinton, except for Arafat. The Clinton Administration had quietly signaled that Dahlan was the future. But by then, the moment had slipped away and Bush had replaced Clinton.

It would take a certain kind of crazy ruthlessness to obtain polonium from a Russian source, poison Arafat, kill his nephew and hope to leverage that into power. And Dahlan had it. He was uniquely vicious and ruthless, eager to take dangerous risks… even when compared to his fellow terrorist gang leaders.

Dahlan was willing to take on Arafat and Hamas. His men killed his rivals and ruled over Dahlanistan. If there was anyone who had the nerve to finish off Arafat and hope to profit from the chaos, it was the Palestinian Authority’s version of Titus Andronicus’s Aaron.

When the mayor announced his 62-point safe streets initiative, which includes lowering the speed limit to 25 mph, he said, “We want the public to know that we are holding ourselves to this standard.”

As CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday, the mayor’s two-car caravan was seen speeding, blowing through stop signs, and violating other traffic laws. Kramer reported that if the driver of the lead car, which carried the mayor in its passenger seat, had been cited, he would have racked up enough points to get his license suspended.

He explained that PA law grants terrorists imprisoned for more than five years a salary of 4,000 shekels ($1140) a month, which continues for three years following their release from prison. This is in addition to monthly salary payments while in prison.

The terrorist explained that because his first imprisonment for planning a suicide terror attack (which was foiled) lasted less than five years, it was not enough to prompt the 4,000 shekels ($1140) monthly salary upon release. He therefore planned another attack in order to reach a total of five years in prison, which would entitle him to the additional salary upon his second release, which would cover his debts.

Meanwhile in Florida, specifically, in 2012, 362 black people and 344 white people were arrested on murder charges. Now we all know that statistics are racist, all justice systems are biased and etc, but those same stats also show 1,729 white people arrested for sexual assault and 968 black people, so that’s a pretty specific bias.

(Considering that Florida is only 17% African-American, that 968 number is still really high). So it’s still entirely reasonable for white people to be afraid of a racist crime wave, not the other way around. Sorry Dr. Crunk.

The NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicted a hot winter. They were disastrously wrong. The mistake wasn’t just a technicality. Cities didn’t properly prepare for the coming winter leading to blocked roads, lost work and even deaths.

In New York, Bill de Blasio blamed the government forecasts for his botched handling of the snow situation. He’s not the only one. While local governments still had the responsibility to do the right thing, the Warmist takeover of climate science is leading us into disasters in which dogma trumps science until the snow begins to fall.

Nowadays people don’t ask for references. They just Google your name. And if you Google my name, all sorts of horrifying things come up: Holocaust denier, Nazi apologist, supporter of terrorism. And no responsible administrator in anything, forget about academia, quite literally even the post office. And that’s literal, that’s not poetic. Even for a job at the post office, they won’t consider you.

This year, I’m down to two countries. One is Turkey where I may be teaching, there’s a good chance. The other is Iran and I’ve been working on Iran but so far it hasn’t been successful.

"In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Americans have displayed their true colors of jingoism, a militaristic spirit of nationalism…"

"The attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon did not occur in a vacuum… Rather, this attack was part of an overall blowback to U.S. imperialist policy in support of zionist Israel and opposition to fundamentalist Islam…"

The State scientists now regulate all such matters. Once a month our Officer of Hygiene comes and examines each member of the household. He then prescribes the kind of food he thinks you require for the next few weeks, whether it shall be more or less phosphates, or cereals, or carnivorous preparations.

The few men — by comparison, whom I saw seemed to me to be allowed to exist as specimen examples of a fallen race. Of course, this view is more or less exaggeration. But the women here do appear to possess by far the most energy, vigor, vitality and ambition. Their predominance in office just now is owing to their over-powering number, the women’s vote polled being ten to one over that of the men.

The exercises of the day began at the great Ethical Temple. Here ten thousand children were gathered to listen first to a lecture on the history of Christmas. There was a play in which Santa Claus appeared and a number of other legendary characters, to show the children in what mythological, absurd beings the children of the unenlightened nineteenth century believed in. Then ten thousand toys were distributed, dolls and whips and tops, and sleighs and skates. But as all were distributed indiscriminately by State officers to the children as they passed out on review, of course all the boys got the dolls and the girls the whips and tops.

The FBI has reached a point in its history and functions that it must knuckle under the liberal/left/Marxist perception of criminality, a definition of criminality which exempts genuine criminals by excluding their ideology from official approbation, and treat the ideology's victims as the true criminals. Consciously, or by osmosis, the FBI has adopted those same intrusive, oppressive and totalitarian policies.

Yes, the country is politically and philosophically polarized, between those who value their freedom and those who, no matter how innocuous or petty or grandiose their agenda, wish to extinguish that freedom.

We have reached the point that we fear the FBI knocking on our doors. The FBI, together with the DHS and the DOJ, is gradually becoming, not a counterterrorism shield, but an instrument of counter-freedom.

The FBI has always been an instrument of policy, not law. And that's an important distinction. To the extent that avoiding terrorist attacks is policy, it will fight it, but the deeper policy is CVE or Countering Violent Extremism which means appeasing Muslims. Thus the core policy is not counterterrorism, but community policing and social justice.

ONCE THE HOPE AND CHANGE GOES IN, DOES IT EVER COME OUT?

1. We admitted that like crazed pale metrosexuals we
were powerless over Obama huffing, puffing, and fluffing — that our
political lives had become unmanageable, bereft of truth, justice, and
integrity.

2. Came to believe that a Constitution once again greater than Obama could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our political will and our Obama addiction over to the care of Common Sense as we understood it.

The left likes to use words to mean their opposites. Communist dictatorships like to call themselves “democratic” republics. It’s a cynical tease, because it shows that they know democracy is better than dictatorship.

A cynical lefty euphemism much in use in America is “diversity”. It should mean “variety”, but what it has come to mean in practice is its opposite - “orthodoxy”: a strict doctrinal uniformity of opinion.

The doctrine has achieved enormous success in the universities, which are no longer open to new ideas, no longer allow free debate, no longer question fixed assumptions. That’s what they once existed for. Now they are temples of political correctness, safes for the secure locking up of leftist doctrine.They want a pointless mix of ethnicities and of as many genders as semantic ingenuity can invent, but not of ideas.

Joe is hardly a down-the-line right-winger. He’s more of an ornery, traditional centrist; 30 years ago he would probably have been a “Reagan Democrat.” But he committed the cardinal sin of challenging Barack Obama on “redistributionist” tax policy during the 2008 campaign. Apparently, he’ll never be forgiven: not so much for doing that, perhaps, as for failing to recant under pressure afterward.

The hard left has been sarcastic about Joe joining a union, as if it’s ironic: as if joining a union is inconsistent with believing in freedom of choice and keeping what you earn. That’s worth a pause for reflection.

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comments:

"Any other outcome is impossible. And so he doesn't know what he doesn't know which makes actual progress impossible." This is true. It's virtually impossible to beat some sense into a liberal's mind with logic, reason, and facts. I know a woman who gets all red in the face when I say that Islam is a totalitarian ideology, that it's been slaughtering people for 1,400 years, cite current body counts in Egypt and Syria and Nigeria and the Sudan and elsewhere, but these facts bounce off her psyche like rainfall on a tar road. "Islam is a peaceful religion!" Period. There's no point in getting into an argument with a liberal/lefty unless one is trying to amuse oneself. As for Obamacare, the "science is settled," it works, and if it doesn't, it's because of obstructionists and doubters like me.

tow (toe?) the line: he's partly correct about liberals having a high education level. as we know the colleges are run by left wingers, they influence the students. old habits die hard. people stay in the old mindset, even if the issues have changed & the world has changed. what was conceptual in school doesnt always work in the real world. unfortuntly most people follow "image" rather than values. regardless if they have a PHD or are collecting garbage, they are influenced by movie stars, TV, general propaganda. (whether it be woody allen, phil roberston, its all image). how many think for themselves? who can think critically? everyone sounds like a clone. i "got" the part that he thinks he's superior because he is "gay". i find it absurd that that mr. tow can speak to a shillman fellow that way. there is a shift happening now in america. liberal people are turning conservative more than ever. yes mr. tow, they are very highly educated, accomplished, & some of them are gay.

Small quibble, if I may. You say "We're losing the ability to discuss anything because the dominant cultural paradigm is in the hands of people who care about values..."

I think it's the pretense of values. Their commitment is negative; it is against whatever has been traditionally part of our civilization. Their "values talk" is mere display designed to ennoble what is merely base. For example, they say that they value the freedom to "have" whatever gender identity you want, but they are really against what they consider the restrictions of a two-gender world. Petulance is their animus.

Funnily enough, that "tow the line" error was picked up by George Orwell - in "Politics and the English Language," I think - as an an example of language come adrift from meaning. Orwell was a lefty who despaired of what passed for left wing "thought". I wonder what he'd make of today's preening "progressives".

Re: "Tow the Line"'; intellectual and liberal in the same sentence doesn't work, those who self describe this way are kidding themselves.. Simply stating something doesn't make it true. All those 'caring' people remind me of the line in the Great Gatsby about Daisy and her husband traveling to places where people go 'to be rich together'. That is the elite of the Left in a nutshell. They attended one TED conference and now consider themselves intellectual. You're right, it's 'toe the line'..sophie

Oh my! I laughed so much reading that exchange between you and the "tow" the line "intellectual." You're quite right, of course, that we all, no matter our formal education level, make such silly mistakes, but his "I'm gay, a leftist, and hold a Ph.D. so it's GOT to be 'tow'" defense is as hysterical as it is sad. He didn't even question himself, or use Google apparently, so convinced was he of the intellectual superiority bestowed upon him by his gay + leftist + Ph.D. trifecta of "so there!" self-righteousness.

I enjoyed the tow/toe argument. It then reminded me of all the on-line arguments with people who don't like my opinion, on anything. There's no good-natured ribbing, no allowance that somewhere I might have a point...oh no...I'm wrong, dead wrong and a racist to boot. Or some over vile accusation.How did we all get so angry with each other, what the heck happened to us?

Aw, liberals are okay, once you get the little doofers potty-trained and have taught them some table manners. Just keep them away from machinery with moving parts and they don't get hurt too often. Sad that you rarely find them in useful occupations such as food production and transport, providing treated water or electricity and suchlike.

But I struggle along in my conservative stupidity--for all that I scored 1440 on the GRE.

"We have reached the point that we fear the FBI knocking on our doors. The FBI, together with the DHS and the DOJ, is gradually becoming, not a counterterrorism shield, but an instrument of counter-freedom."

You're all just scrofulous spelling deniers not worth the time to re-train.

This isn't even open for discussion anymore. Something like 97% of all English spelling scientists responded to a peer-reviewed survey and proved that it is, and always has been, "tow the line". Most of the shrill "toe" supporters on the net are just shrieking on behalf of Big Podiatry.